Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

142 I Ramnath
After the upheavals of the it India movement and
Bose's tragic defeat, Lotvala developed "even closer relations
with Acharya," from whom Lotvala "imbibed [even]
more of the anarchist gospel" through the recommended
reading ofBakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker, and Proudhon (his
parricular favorite). His "conversion to the creed of philosophical
anarchism" as he understood it, after a magpie
path, was nearly complete. II
In 1945, the appointed secretaries of the Institute
of Indian Sociology, K. N. Phadke and Shanta Bhalerao,
resigned from their long-standing arrangement with
the Latvala Trust. Though they had been producing articles
on labor and women's rights to supplement the
Hindustan, and holding discussion meetings on current
topics, they could not support the new anarchist trend.
Lotvala appointed Acharya and two others as the institute's
new Managing Committee, tasked with redrafting
its constitution under the new name of the Libertarian
Socialist Institute to reflect the "socialist opinions" of
its members. On August 7, 1947, a week before India
proclaimed its own inclependence, they announced dlC
institute's mission statement: to promote interest, gather
and disseminate information about its way of thinking,
run a library and eponymous journal, generally develop
the discourse around libertarian socialism, and "facilitate
the study of natural and social sciences;' which it linked to
human happinessY
Historically, governments are found to rest on
force, maintain injustice, curtail freedom, cause